Tag Archives: Rancière

I gave a research seminar at Exeter last week, talking through an argument I have been knocking around for a while about how to draw on certain strains of political theory in order to clarify what cities might have to do with democracy. It’s actually quite difficult to set about this task at the moment without bumping into some version of an argument about the post-democratic city and the apparently post-political contemporary condition. But I did my best to do so, and for the most part succeeded.

I remain rather puzzled by just how much airtime the ‘post-political’ story has gotten, even if only as a reference point around which people interested in issues like contestation and democracy feel the need to orient themselves (in that sense, it surely qualifies as having a hegemonic status in more lefty varieties of human geography). There is something patently absurd about a frame of analysis, however wrapped around with citations and quotes from retro-style master philosophers, which predetermines in advance that all sorts of interesting looking political phenomena are not, in fact, properly political at all – because they seem not to conform to a risibly constricted definition of what the properly political should look like. There is more than a touch of Humpty-Dumpty in the way that the ‘post-political’ has come to be conceptualised in geography and urban studies and related fields.

The topic of the post-political did come up after the talk, in the Q&A and over coffee afterwards, and this set me to thinking, on the way home mainly, about the trajectory taken by ideas about ‘the political’ since I can first remember coming across them (I can remember reading Nancy Fraser write about this notion, and its importance to certain strands of French poststructuralism, when I started out as a graduate student, in her collection Unruly Practices; then in Simon Critchley’s book on The Ethics of Deconstruction, via the collections of Lefort’s writing published by Polity around that time). The first time you read about the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, I suspect, in whatever form, it is an arresting idea. It can open up new avenues of inquiry. But as versions of this distinction have diffused through Theory-land, so it has become a progressively more simplistic theme.

In its ‘hegemonic’ form, the concept of ‘the political’ has become associated with a relentlessly dualistic style of thinking – one that offsets contestation against consensus, disruption against stability, openness against closure. Guess which side of each pair counts as being ‘properly’ political? Surely it shouldn’t be quite so difficult to imagine politics as involving, ‘properly’, a range of relationships between questioning, challenging, acting, deciding, enmity, friendship, compromise, brokering, deal-making, principle, antagonism, hypocrisy, and the like.

I think you can identify three broad variants of the politics/political distinction circulating in Theory-land, some of which might be more dominant in some fields in some times than the others (the three-fold distinction is a bit rough and ready, but hey, this is a blogpost remember, it’s not a refereed academic journal article).

1). First, most recently, there is the currently very loud variant which takes the form of diagnosing pretty much anything and everything as ‘post-political’ – via selective invocations of Zizek, Badiou, sometimes Ranciere, perhaps Mouffe, and never mind all the conflations involved. Perhaps also via a nod in the direction of some more or less antiquarian philosophical authority, Spinoza perhaps, or Aristotle (Marx has a famous line about Aristotle not being able to quite grasp the secret of the relation between human labour, equality, and value because he lived in a society founded on slavery. It seems to me the same thought might apply equally well to the question of just how far one should extend unquestioned authority to thinkers whose notions of, say, democracy were formulated before, for example, women were enfranchised).

This is the variant of ‘the political’ under which the politics of climate change, or of human rights, or of multiculturalism all turn out to be, yes, you guessed it, not properly political at all. As menacing to the properly political, as really oriented to closing down the properly political – because in some way apparently too concerned with compromise, coalition building, negotiation, bargaining, or other grubby practices very often thought to epitomise politics, for good or ill. Occupy, and notions of the Commons, would also seem to qualify as tending towards the post-political. The analysis of the post-political serves as an adjunct to discourses of ‘hegemonic neoliberalism’, and shares in some of the same problems – not least the tendency to over-estimate the degree to which the success of political programmes must depend on some degree of ideological trickery at the level of ‘subjectivization’.

As I have said, the defining feature of this variant is the claim that there is one, single, dare one say essential, sense of ‘the political’, which is proper (not necessarily real, but certainly proper). There is a common enough conflation of proper politics with proper democracy in this style of work, although the stronger inflection is one which just makes the properly political a smart way of saying ‘revolution’ – a notion which, if you think about, might not be terribly political itself, just a way of wishing for short cuts.

In discussions of the post-political, one finds the culmination of one strong tendency lying behind a range of conceptualisations of ‘the political’ – a more or less explicit reassertion of the primacy of philosophical reason over the impudence of social science, and/or over those more modest concepts of philosophical practice that presume that philosophy stands alongside rather than over and above other fields of inquiry. (In this respect, the latest round of strongly philosophically grounded arguments about the post-political stand in interesting contrast to the drift in other strains of non-‘Continental’ political theory and political philosophy to want to draw closer to empirical fields of political inquiry, in say the recent work of Raymond Geuss or Jeremy Waldron).

Methodologically, the analysis of our post-political condition depends on a weird slippage – when one finds an example of partisan political action making use of consensual rhetoric, or of a political action culminating in a decision being made in the favour of some interests rather than others, or at the expense of others, then what you have found, it turns out, is not politics being done at all, but the end of politics, the closing down of the properly political. One would have thought that it’s not that difficult to recognise that politics is a game that turns on different ways of relating the partisan and the common, the partial and the universal, the specific and the general, at the level of rhetoric and action; dare one say it, even the consensual and the a(nta)gonistic (that’s what compromise, bargaining, deal-making are after all). One might also think that the literature on the politics/the political distinction has some interesting ways of understanding the dynamics of those relations. One would have thought, too, that the fact that some people end up being better at politics than others – that it’s a game of winners and losers – could be understood as an important part of the game, worthy of some analytical attention, and not just interpreted as being an effort to end of the game.

2). The analysis of post-political conditions is a simplistic rendition of one tendency within a broader range of discussions of ‘the political’. In this broader tradition, out of which the post-political is distilled, you can find all sorts of versions of the distinction between politics and the political at work, presented in a variety of relations: ones of ontological depth, ones of constitutive outsides and closures, ones of imaginary constitutions. It would be worth considering just how ‘local’ this range of literature is, across its variety – it is shaped by a distinctively late-twentieth century response to mid-century historical events, mediated by a culturally specific discourse of totalitarianism.

There is no doubt plenty of scope here for the dualistic default which leads to the diagnosis of post-political conditions, but I suspect if read ‘properly’, oops, then what remains of value in work worrying away at the relation between politics and the political in a more or less ontological, more or less phenomenological lineage, is the sense of a non-reductive relationship between the ontic and the ontological, or perhaps the actual and virtual. The ‘retreat of the political’ was never just about the retreat of proper politics, after all. The problem may be the temptations offered by the conceptual spatialisations of constitutive outsides and distributions of the sensible – all to easily lending themselves as they do to an application to stylized social facts in which the aim is to hunt down closures and exclusions and expulsions and repressions, always ready to re-energise the properly political if given half the chance.

In this variant of ‘the political’, it would seem to me that the lesson is that a particular formation of ordinary politics could always be thought of as an expression of some possible variety of ‘the political’; or perhaps as disclosing some hitherto unimagined possibility of ‘the political’. And there is no reason to suppose that these manifestations necessarily close off or exclude potentials. Why should we conceptualise politics or the political according to this economy of scarcity, after all?

The difference in interpretation I am suggesting here is something like the difference between a straightforward notion of something being lost in the translation of a text, and a more ‘Benjaminian’ notion of translation being the medium in which translat-ability is disclosed as the very life of the text. By which I mean, first, that there is nothing proper about the political or politics; and second, that in trying to think about politics and change, it might be better to look ahead rather than constantly look backwards.

3. My sense of there being a third variant of the concept of ‘the political’ is meant to gesture at a less canonical understanding – it might still have some theoretical ummph behind it, with reference to Pierre Rosanvallon for example; or Habermas even, or Latour, or Foucault, or other thinkers who less obviously belong to the canon of thinking that underwrites discussions of the political and the post-political (or sit less easily in it at least). Whether or not one can authorise this third variant of thinking about ‘the political’ by reference to appropriate thinkers, it actually seems to me to be the only interesting thing one can do with the politics/’the political’ distinction once you have read about it for the second, third or fourth time. This variant of ‘the political’ is a more resolutely genealogical understanding, departing more fully from the recurrent tendency to model discussions of the political on some more or less sophisticated understanding of ontological difference. Here, all that the concept of the political does, and all that the implied distinction that it opens up helps with, is to point you in the direction of looking at the hand-in-hand mutations of the forms and contents of politics. Of course, you still need some working notion of what counts as politics and/or political do this, but there is no reason to suppose our working definitions have to pick out a depth of ontological solidity of some sort, however fluid and wobbly those depths might turn out to be, or alight on some ahistorical notion of the properly political act. I’m not sure a genealogy of politics, or of anything faintly political, could possibly get under way if you thought that there was something proper to politics and the political. It would be a kind of contradiction in terms.

So I guess this all leaves me thinking about why the genealogical interpretation of what is, after all, a fairly simple idea (that what shows up as political in one context might not show up in others, that political issues are framed differently in different situations, that new issues and new understandings of politics can emerge, and that these boundaries are where some, not all, political action takes place), why the genealogical interpretation seems not to resonate more strongly. And why, even when it does, it easily falls back onto judgments about closures and exclusions. This might have something to do with the imperative of ‘The politics of …’ in contemporary Theory-land – the demand that each and every analysis have a political point to it. The analysis of post-political trajectories seems to be perfect for this sort of task – it lends itself easily to the challenge of having not only to describe and explain social events, but to pass judgment on them too, by providing a ready-made template for identifying closures and exclusions, naturalisations and orderings, norms enforced or norms evaded (which is, of course, what a norm is, one way or the other).

The judgement of things being or trending to the ‘post-political’ allows you to have your normative cake without having to pay the normative price: by suggesting that it is proper politics per se that is menaced, you don’t really have to go into great detail about whether particular patterns of decision or inaction are justified or not. You just need to invoke a vague, unspecified sense of proper politics as being all about contestation and questioning, perhaps calling this democracy too. This normative duplicity works not least through the persistent spatialisation of political concepts in this strain of work, allied to the ‘scarcity’-based interpretation of concept of ‘the political’. But think about it for just a moment: decisions, to take one favoured example, don’t exclude, or close things off. They are particular types of action that take place in time, and things go on after they are taken, in more or less anticipated directions. In short, diagnoses of the ‘post-political’ this-or-that have no meaningful sense of political time.

Just came across a rather good essay on Guided Freedom by Tony Bennett, picking apart the authority ‘tricks’ which underwrite Rancière’s elevation of a good-old fashioned model of Kant’s aesthetic judgement into an account of political equality and freedom. Particularly welcome is its bringing into view “the kind of authority Rancière deploys against that of the sociologist and the empirical disciplines more generally”.

My favourite line: “… Rancière lives in a metaphysical glasshouse that is of a distinctively Christian construction …”. Which is not quite as dismissive as it might sound, or not in the direction you might think at least – amongst other things, Bennett’s piece is a nice reminder of how this strand of theory manages to re-centre a resolutely parochial style of thinking about politics, culture and critique into a universal ideal, and manages to disavow its own ‘conditions of possibility’ in so doing.

Kurt Ivesen, over at the Cities and Citizenship blog, posted a comment on my post about local politics in Swindon last week, which I have been thinking about for a week or so, busy with other things. I haven’t had many comments, so thanks, Kurt, you’ve made me think. But not change my mind…

Kurt raises a couple of substantive issues about different meanings of ‘the post-political’, and the use and mis-use of Ranciere on this topic:

“I think I would make a distinction between post-politics as a condition (i.e. “society these days is post-political”) and post-politics as a tendency or strategy. For me, the problem is when the concept is applied in the first way. And I think it can be kinda useful when applied in the second way.”

That seems fair enough, certainly arguments about post-political conditions seem dull and uninteresting and easily refuted empirically, and are unimaginative conceptually. But I’m still not convinced by the idea of post-politics in the second sense, especially not when informed by Ranciere’s style of political philosophizing. Kurt says that for Ranciere post-politics is “a characteristic of various attempts to put decisions beyond the realm of politics that we see going on around us all the time.” Now, of course, everything turns on what you think counts as politics in deciding whether certain strategies are moves within political games, or moves beyond them. I don’t really see why one should suppose that efforts by political actors (acting strategically to further their own interests and bolster those of their constituencies), to shape the terms of debates, to move issues and decisions out of fields of more-or-less deliberative, more-or-less participatory, more-or-less inclusive, more-or-less contestatatory forums should be thought of as a moving beyond politics, of post-politicization at all. It’s just one set of political strategies that might be pursued. The post-political diagnosis, in the second sense that Kurt endorses, seems still to depend on a rather narrow understanding of what politics is, or more precisely, what it should be – it’s an understanding of politics so narrow as to disallow the ‘political’ status of bargaining or deal-making, administrative rule-making, judicial decision-making, clientalism and patronage, the sorts of forms of ordinary graft and ‘corruption’ dubbed “political society” by Partha Chatterjee, the forms of strategic disorder discussed by Patrick Chabal in his account of African politics – none of these seem to accord with the criterion of the properly political as defined by Ranciere.

On Kurt’s reading, Ranciere might have inflected my little vignette about local politics in Swindon a little differently: “In the story above, sure, there might indeed be politics, and I agree that it would be wrong to characteriseSwindonas a ‘post-political town’. But it seems to me that there is a post-political tendency in the story too. Like when the wind-turbines are supported by both Tories and Labour alike because “there is no alternative” if we want to keep the plant competitive. Isn’t this an attempt to take the decision out of the realm of democratic decision-making and into the realm of economic necessity? And isn’t part of the movement against them a struggle to make the decision a political decision to be settled democratically, as opposed to a managerial one? As such, could some concept of ‘post-politics’ help in unpacking what is going on in Swindon and elsewhere?”

Actually, on reflection, prompted by Kurt’s questions, this seems to me a pre-eminently political story, all the way down. Above all, I see no reason to suppose that the efforts of political parties to frame issues in particular ways, to their advantage, and to define some interests as trumping others (i.e. the ‘general’ interests of the whole town in the success of Honda, somewhat differently understood no doubt by Tories and Labour; against the ‘narrow’ interests of local residents living close to the plant), is a sign of a move towards post-politics – it might be a sign of a reconfiguration of politics, but that’s a different sort of analysis entirely. That’s what political parties do, it’s what they are for, it’s what makes them political actors in the first place. And I’m not sure that the equally routine form of campaign by local residents against the wind turbines does really qualify as full-on dissensual action of the sort that Ranciere takes as the model of ‘democratic’ politics. An analysis that sees only post-politics or de-politicization in this sort of fairly ordinary example seems to me to be missing an awful lot of what makes politics political.

So, I remain unconvinced of the utility of this approach – it seems to turn on a conflation of politics with democracy, both rather narrowly defined, and rather weirdly defined too, by reference primarily to a generalised Kantian model of sublime experience (the last recourse for a whole host of French theorists of a certain generation and broadly shared political trajectory). If one thinks of the world divided between forces of order and disruption, constituted power and constituted power, or similar conceptual pairs, then I guess the seeming absence of dissensual disruption is always likely to look like hegemonic reproduction, the routines of ‘police’, the on-set of the post-political.

There is actually a shared spatial and temporal imagination across a set of currently fashionable theoretical approaches to ‘the political’, which might be usefully interrogated. For example, at what ‘scale’ is it assumed that ‘the sensible’ is partaged, so to speak? Are there local formations of the sensible; national ones? And likewise, over what temporal scale is dissensual-democratic-political action enacted – can it endure, be sustained over time, be institutionalised and maintain it’s status as dissensual-democratic-political action? Above all, is it possible to rule dissensually? Imagine that. Because, after all, democracy may or may not ‘mean equality’ (actually, doesn’t it imply equality, of a certain sort, which is not quite the same as ‘democracy means equality’). But it certainly seems to imply ruling and being ruled.

One of the theorists who is all the rage in spatial-theory-land at the moment, subject of a veritable ‘second coming’, is German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Society and Space had a special issue on his work a year or so ago, and Stuart Elden has edited a collection of essays on his work which is forthcoming. It’s interesting to watch this process, in particular the finessing of Sloterdijk’s political interventions. Sloterdijk is a professional provocateur, and amongst the various ‘controversies’ he has triggered in the world of German letters revolves around a Ayn Rand-like assault on the welfare state in 2009. I’m a bit slow, so am only now catching up on this, because I’m trying to write something about Honneth. You can read a summary of Sloterdijk’s position in English here in Forbes magazine or here in City Journal, both resolutely proud free-market publications. You can read Axel Honneth’s substantive response to Sloterdijk in translation here. Apart from the obvious politics to this (see the commendation of Sloterdijk by the National Review) there is also a dispute about how to interpret the role of various emotional dynamics in political life – a central theme of Honneth’s reconstruction of critical theory, and a feature of Sloterdijk’s work too since his ‘first coming’, in his analysis of cynicism. Rage makes the world go round for Sloterdijk, whereas disrespect and dignity are key dynamics for Honneth. Might sound similar, but quite different really. I’m not inclined to get too excited about Sloterdijk’s spatial metaphysics, which is what does excite geographers and others who like all things ontological; I actually think the reactionary inflection he gives to an analytics of resentment is helpful in reminding us that simply asserting the importance of ‘the emotional’ or ‘affect’ in life has no necessary political meaning per se – everything depends on how this affirmation is worked through. The Sloterdijk/Honneth to-do is interesting for drawing out the significance of this issue, and also helps to clarify an issue at stake in suggestions that Honneth’s ethics of recognition has some affinities with the work of Rancière – an affinity rooted in a particular sort of commitment to avoid a scholastic disdain for ordinary people (the case is made by Jean-Philippe Deranty).

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Via Continental Philosophy, here is an audio of Jacques Rancière, talking about the relationship of critical theory and contemorary social movements. It’s only 20 minutes long, but it’s a concise little summary of his position, mainly being rude about what he sees as the sellinof out of the emancipatory promise by current critical theorists, though its unclear sometimes exactly who he has in mind. There is a swipe at the ontological flights of fancy of Sloterdijk, and a slightly more sustained reference to Boltanski and Chiapello’s account of the spirits of capitalism.

His basic argument is that various facets of classical critical theory are now deployed in an inverted way, so that the main objects of criticism in analyses of consumerism or commodity culture are now the subjects of these processes, ordinary people themselves. The main object of critique, Rancière suggests, has become the ignorance and culpability of ordinary people.

This rings true for me, I think it is a feature of a great deal of contemporary theory, forced to find some ‘political’ purchase for its culturalist analyses, to end up focussing on how people have been ‘got at’ in one way or another, and to lament their susceptibility (this is also a feature of many ‘moralised’ fields of social science, on climate change and environmental issues, on behaviour change, on global poverty).

Rancière proposes an alternative, quite old fashioned model of critique, derived from Kant – critique as the reflection on and elaboration of the conditions of possibility of emancipatory action. That’s much the same concept of critique you find in ‘third generation’ big-C, big-T Critical Theorists like Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth.

Rancière’s version of this Kantian model of critique is notable of course because of the emphasis he places on the principle of equality of intelligence or competence, specifically of aesthetic judgement. This is the principle contravened by scholastic disdain for ordinary consumer entertainments and commodity cultures.

Rancière’s point against Boltanski and Chiapello seems, however, to replay an older division between a more sociological take on aesthetic discourse, that emphasises aesthetics as a discourse of distinction and differentiation, and a more populist affirmation of the universality of aesthetic competence (in Anglo cultural studies, see Paul Willis or Tony Bennett might stand for different positions on this). Rancière implies that the identification of two styles of critique of capitalism, a social and an aesthetic one, by Boltanski and Chiapello replays a bourgeois disdain for the aesthetic competencies of working people. I’m not sure this is convincing. The sociological analysis of the differentiating deployment of aesthetic values is normally animated by exactly the sort of universalist, egalitarian commitment that Rancière affirms – it’s perhaps less prone to the philosophical presumptions that his egalitarian account of aesthetics reproduces.